Women's football, growing exponentially, reaches a peak on the occasion of the World Cup that starts tomorrow with the match between New Zealand and Norway (9:00 am), in Auckland. For the first time, 32 teams, more than 700 players and one million tickets sold. The expectation that it arouses in the antipodes, as it is held in Australia and New Zealand, exceeds any of the previous events. Of all the participants, the best is a Spaniard, Alexia Putellas who, although coming off a serious injury, is a double winner of the Ballon d'Or and is at the forefront of a Spain that is healing internal injuries and seeking to demonstrate the unstoppable progression of women's football. In our country.

This ninth edition of the World Cup will have, for the first time, two countries as hosts that, curiously, are part of different confederations. Australia belongs to Asia and New Zealand to Oceania.. The growth to 32 teams also shows the leap in women's football. In the first two World Cups, held in China (1991) and Sweden (1995), 12 teams competed. In the next four, which took place in the United States (1999 and 2003), China (2007) and Germany (2011), 16 participated, and in the two most recent there were 24: Canada (2015) and France (2019).

The tournament also grows in follow-up. As reported by FIFA, for the match between Australia and Ireland the “no tickets” sign has been hung. More than 80,000 seats have been sold. The excess demand for this match forced FIFA to have to change the venue. The initial idea was that it would take place at the Sydney Football Stadium, but it will finally be held at Stadium Australia, with a capacity for 83,500 spectators.

Ticketing

And it is that, as Gianni Infantino announced a little over a month ago, 1,032,844 seats had been sold. A figure that exceeds that registered in the last edition, in France 2019, which by now had sold some 750,000.

Although the numbers so far are good, a few days ago FIFA announced that it will give away 20,000 tickets for matches held in New Zealand, due to concerns about slow sales in that country, unlike in Australia.. Sarai Bareman, general director of women's football at the institution, stated that in this territory it is more difficult to attract spectators to the stadiums. That is why some of the sponsors, such as Xero, offer 5,000 courtesy tickets for the matches in the four host cities.

Another piece of information that reveals the boom that women's football is experiencing is the number of countries that will broadcast the event. Four years ago, the World Cup was broadcast in 135 countries; this year they will do it in 189. In addition, FIFA expects the audience to be around 2,000 million viewers.. A figure that would practically double the 1,089 million people who watched the tournament played in France for at least an hour.

The opponent to beat

The strongest contender for the title is the United States. She has been crowned world champion four times (1991, 1999, 2015 and 2019), and considering that only eight have been held, it is a 50% success rate.. Awesome.

In addition, the Americans can make history in this competition by becoming the first team, of all the World Cups, to manage to lift three consecutive trophies.. He has participated in all the editions, and if you think that he has been below third place in any of them, you are wrong. Vlatko Andonovski's girls have achieved, in addition to the titles, three bronzes and one silver.

These excellent results make the United States the great rival to beat, although not the only one. Another team with many possibilities is England. In the last two editions, the English have been third and fourth, respectively. Maybe this year will be yours. They have as a point in favor the achievement of two consecutive championships: the Eurocopa 2022 and the Finalissima 2023. But, despite these good results, the reality is that England arrives at this World Cup with two sensitive casualties: the captain Leah Williamson and the striker Beth Mead.

Spain debuts on Friday

Finally, there is Germany. It is not going through its best moment, since it has been a decade without winning any title. However, it occupies the second position in the FIFA ranking and exhibits a great list of winners, with eight Euro Cups and two World Cups.

Where is Spain? Well, Jorge Vilda's players, who are staying in Palmerston North, a city 59 kilometers from the furthest inhabited place in Madrid, do not start in a bad position. They occupy sixth place in the FIFA ranking and have among their ranks the best player in the world today, although Putellas has arrived with physical problems.

It is the third time that Spain participates in the World Cup. In the previous edition they fell in the round of 16, although of course, the rival was the United States. They also did not achieve a great position in Canada, in 2015, since they did not go beyond the group stage. The balance so far indicates that of the seven games played, Spain has won one, drawn two and lost four. Numbers that Vilda's players hope to improve in the World Cup, in which Spain makes its debut on Friday (9:30 am, Teledeporte), against Costa Rica. The matches against Zambia, on the 26th (9:30 a.m.) and Japan, on the 31st (9:00 a.m.), will close their first phase. From there, if you qualify, to dream of anything.

The Spanish team touched the sky in Fukuoka to become world champion and won gold in the technical routine, the main test of the discipline, in a final in which they beat Italy and the United States and with which they secure a Olympic square at the Paris Games.

Spain completed a fusion mix of flamenco and a popular Japanese song, in a nod to the World Cup headquarters and also to the origin of the coach, Mayuko Fujiki, who will also go down in history after some rather difficult seasons.

Ole Fukuoka summarizes the trajectory, the origin of the team, the essence of its swimmers and the Asian touch of Mayu. The execution was impeccable, without errors, and the artistic impression at a high level, at the level of the best, of the one offered by China and Japan, although with a difference: the Asian ones fail; the Spanish are infallible.

“We'll all get through”

The exercise was filled with messages, some imperceptible, but added one by one, they offer a wonderful composition.. Thus the voices of the Spanish swimmers are recorded in the routine and part of the lyrics are interpreted in Japanese sign language.

And little by little, Spain was reeling off its countdown to gold. What is the message of the Japanese song?: “It says that everyone is special, that life is hard, but the sun is always above us, and that we will all get ahead with the help of our peers”, Fujiki assured EFE.

Spain began by drawing a platform with the eight swimmers and Sara Saldaña continued, as a jumper, emulating a 'bailaora'. One of the great moments was an aquatic 'zapateao' at eight o'clock, the evocation of the popular Japanese song and the simulated sound of castanets in the final part.

Spain added 281.6893 points to Italy's 274.5155 and the United States' 273.7396, a team coached by Andrea Fuentes, a member of the old Spanish dream team.

a decade later

The team had not been on the podium in team competitions since 2013, in that World Cup in Barcelona that marked the end point for a great generation of swimmers, a competition in which they won silver in technical, free and combo teams, although then they were the Russian team as the great dominator of the world concert.

The team, made up of Iris Tió, Alisa Ozhogina, Meritxell Mas, Sara Saldaña, Paula Ramírez, Blanca Toledano, Cristina Arámbula and Marina García, is the one that has made history, the one that will proudly wear the gold sought for so many years.

This is the fifth medal after the gold for Fernando Díaz del Río (technical gold), the bronze for Iris Tió (technical only), the silver for the mixed technical duo (Emma García and Dennis González) and the also bronze in the technical duo ( Alisa Ozhogina and Iris Tió).

Campazzo and Real Madrid cross paths again. This has been confirmed by the club chaired by Florentino Pérez in a statement announcing the return of the great Argentine point guard, who will complete his second spell in the white team after disassociating himself from the Red Star. He remains linked to Madrid for 4 seasons, until June 30, 2027

The 32-year-old player will celebrate his sixth season at Real Madrid after a two-year adventure with the Nuggets, a fleeting agreement with the Mavericks and his time at Red Star, to which he has paid his clause of 50,000 euros to be able to return to white discipline.

“Facu, thank you for everything you have done for Red Star! Good luck in continuing your career!” the Belgrade club said goodbye on its website.

His previous stage in Madrid was a successful relationship for both actors since together they managed to lift 11 titles: 2 European Cups, 3 Leagues, 2 Copas del Rey and 4 Spanish Super Cups.

In addition, on an individual level, Campazzo has been chosen twice in the League's ideal five (2018-19 and 2019-20) wearing the Real Madrid shirt, 1 time MVP of the League final playoff (2018-2019), 2 times MVP of the Super Cup (2019 and 2020) and 1 time MVP of the Copa del Rey (2020).

Now, he comes to the current European champion, with the poster of being one, if not the best, base of Europe

Inter Miami have announced the signing of Spanish left-back Jordi Alba, who will join his former Barcelona teammates Lionel Messi and Sergio Busquets.

“We are going to sign Jordi Alba today,” said businessman Jorge Mas, co-owner of the team along with David Beckham, during a meeting with the press.

The Spanish international announced in May his departure from Barcelona where he spent 11 seasons. Now he will join two of his former teammates in the culé team: the Argentine Messi and his compatriot Busquets.

Alba, 34, won the League of Nations with the Spanish team last month, one more title for his enviable record.

The left-back has won, among other titles, a European Championship, a Champions League, six Spanish championships and a European Super Cup.

Inter Miami is confident that his new team, led by superstar Messi, can turn the tide in the American soccer league, MLS.. At the moment, it occupies the last place in the championship.

“He's a total maniac,” said the commentators on the poker website that broadcast the Las Vegas World Series (WSOP), this year away from the ESPN sports network. The Galician Juan Maceiras, also known as LocoBoy, was the absolute dominator of the main tournament of the event for two critical days. The historical record of participants, more than 10,000 in the Main Event alone, allowed the winner to be awarded 12.1 million dollars, four times more than Carlos Alcaraz achieved for winning Wimbledon.

“I don't think I'm going crazy. People call me a maniac, but I only bluff when I think it's time”, declared Maceiras, who has returned to poker in style, after a few years of hiatus. Spanish belongs to one of the families closest to the card known. His sister María, also a player, won the Spanish Championship twice a decade and a half ago. Locoboy was close to victory when, with 12 players remaining, he had almost a quarter of the chips in his possession, but he had a fateful end to the tournament and could only finish eighth, with a prize of $1,125,000.

Actually, the true star of the family was always the father, Juan Maceiras Barros, in his day the youngest doctor in Spain, elected and re-elected mayor of Miño. In the years of the explosion of internet poker, he became famous under the nickname of Vietcong01, with a little academic game and the help of what he baptized as the pun.

final table

His son Juan, tired but happy when he was still the leader, boasted about his father during one of the breaks: “He did something that no one had done before, taking all the big online tournaments, including the Sunday Million, which he won twice”. Sitting to his left, another Spaniard, José Aguilera, was fighting to also enter the grand final of the tournament.. He managed to finish among the ten chosen ones who finally met at the same table, survivors among the 10,043 participants of a tournament that began on July 3.

Bad luck left Aguilera out of the final table of nine, the official one, in which close to a third of the 93 million total prize pool of the Main Event was distributed. The Spaniard was short-stacked after a triple clash (his queens against the kings and the jacks of two other players), in which the player with the worst cards won, coincidentally Daniel Weinman, who ended up winning the tournament. random things. The American, a tired poker pro, went from elimination to glory. Aguilera had to be content with tenth place.

In that diabolical mixture of skill and luck that is poker, Maceiras showed that not everything is coincidence and he spent at least two whole days stoking the unfortunate people who occupied his table.. As players dropped, the prize-hopping at the Horseshoe Hotel became more and more outrageous.. Player number 12, Cong Pham, took home $535,000. Aguilera got 700,000 and the ninth classified got 900,000. Maceiras was the first millionaire, in a dynamic in which each elimination is dramatic. As one of the participants said, that looked like 'The Hunger Games'.

technology graduate

Weinman admitted after his victory that he had been “very lucky”, but also that he felt like the best player of the last three, all of them Americans, after eliminating the other six Europeans who reached the final table.. The winner decided to give poker a try after graduating from the Georgia Institute of Technology, his hometown.. “When the boom hit, I had a feeling I was going to play poker and try for a few years.. And here we are, 16 years later…. One feels that perhaps my time has come”

Daniel confesses that after 16 years in which he only entered prizes once in the main tournament, although he did win another minor bracelet, he was beginning to get tired of playing cards.. He was about to not sign up for the tournament of his life, but his girlfriend Sarah encouraged him to spend one more bullet: “I was burned out and I didn't like the structure of the tournament, it was too good”. When he won the record prize, he burst into tears with emotion.

Weinman had to answer the classic question about what he will do with the money: “I have no idea,” he said. “I'll probably reverse it. It's probably not the best answer that everyone wants to hear, but I'm pretty prudent with money off the table, even though I like to gamble a lot.”

Maceiras, during the World Cup in Las Vegas. hayley hochstetler

Despite the bitter end, a World Series of Poker (WSOP) with so much Spanish prominence is not remembered. Carlos Mortensen won the main tournament in 2001 and then we only had two finalists in the big test in Las Vegas (Larrabe and Pons). In exchange, they have won up to 16 bracelets, one less than the great dominator of the Series, the American Phil Helmut, a disputed player who nevertheless dominates the historical classification in an overwhelming way.. This year he achieved one more title, which he celebrated in style with the loud style that characterizes him.

The Spanish progression is indisputable. Last year, Leo Margets and Adrián Mateos won the last two bracelets. This year, Samuel Bernabéu from Alicante won tournament number 79, with a prize of $682,000. In that same event, also in no-limit Texas Holdem, Ramón Fernández was seventh and took home more than 100,000 big tickets.. No limit means that you can bet all the chips in any hand. Putting the deeds to the house, the car keys and even a close relative on the table is left for the movies.

Even better for ours was tournament number 57, in the complicated modality of Pot Limit Omaha, where players receive four hole cards instead of two.. The Spaniard Ka Kwan Lau (Kaju for friends) achieved victory in a final heads-up against his compatriot Sergio Martínez. The first earned 2.3 million, and the second, 1.4.

The last woman on stand up

In the list of Spaniards who will return from Las Vegas with a full wallet we can include the French Estelle Cohuet, who has lived in Palma de Mallorca for three decades and achieved the title of Last Woman Standing, the last woman standing in the tournament WSOP main. He finished in 68th position and earned a $130,000 bounty.

Another 24 Spaniards also managed to enter prizes in the competition. Among them, another player stands out, Lucía Navarro, who won a title, but outside the WSOP. On his first day in Las Vegas, just landed, he was encouraged to warm up at the Aria hotel, where he beat more than 500 players.

The Spaniard confirms to EL MUNDO the fever for playing cards that exists in the city: “All the tournaments in all the casinos are always full and with massive waiting lists. It seems that there has been another small poker boom”, he assures. This resurgence is partly explained by his economic situation: “You can see that they are more buoyant here. In addition, there is a lot of poker tradition and therefore there is a lot more recreational player than in Europe.” That makes the road to the final tables sometimes a little less steep for professionals.

Our country, by the way, also won a more honorary title than anything else, the Soccer World Cup in Las Vegas, which was played indoors, with Maceiras again as a star. Not surprisingly, the Galician was trained at an American university thanks to a scholarship awarded for his skills with the ball.

Fernando Díaz del Río received three kisses from his coach, Anna Vega. Three kisses in three key moments for the new world champion in artistic swimming, previously synchronized, in the first men's solo world event.

The first was in the tunnel before facing the pool where he would make history. It was his second exercise, he started as leader after his first performance, and his tactic was clear. “Maybe I was somewhat conservative, but with the new scoring system it is very easy to be penalized and you can be left off the podium,” he explained in conversation with EL MUNDO.

After that first kiss, which barely elicited a half smile from his pupil due to the accumulated tension, and a few words of encouragement, Fernando went out to conquer the world under the notes of 'Unholy' by Sam Smith, with arrangements by Salvador Niebla. 'Impuro' says the title of the song, the complete opposite of what Díaz del Río did in the water that combined splits (leg openings) and twists (turns) as if he were in his element. and maybe it was. “I've been doing ballet since I was very young and I combined it with swimming, so artistic is the perfect combination,” he reveals.

Another moment from Del Río in his technical-only exercise. KIYOSHI OTA EFE

Two minutes later, this 20-year-old canary emerged from the pool shyly waving to some members of the Spanish swimming delegation, who had already accumulated three medals to their credit, but none of them gold, who shouted in encouragement.. “Having gone to the final first, I didn't want to lower the bar,” he explained.

He did not lower it, although his face was indecipherable when he clung to the ladder leading out of the pool.. Anna Vega then gave him her second kiss, apparently more positive than her pupil or, at least, facing the outside. Fernando, 'Fer' as they call him in the Spanish delegation, returned to his half smile without losing concentration, as if his routine had not finished.

Perhaps the endless sessions at the CAR in Sant Cugat were going through his head, the facilities through which other myths of artistic swimming have passed, such as Andrea Fuentes, Ona Carbonnell, Anna Tarrés or Gemma Mengual, another of his coaches, between the pool , the gym and the ballet. “Between six and eight hours a day,” said Díaz del Río.

A center that he reached after a meteoric rise in the artistic. A promotion that left behind his sister, “his inspiration”, but who could only compete in championships in Spain and was never able to make the leap to the international scene. “I started when they added the mixed duo in Spain,” explained Díaz del Río. He was twelve years old when he took his first artistic steps at the Las Palmas Swimming Club where, last year, he received the medal for sports merit. 16 when he made his international debut.

Fernando del Río bites into his gold medal. KIYOSHI OTA EFE

Hand in hand, Díaz del Río allowed himself to be guided by Anna Vega to the chair where the final grades are awaited. And then the note: 224,555 points, the number you will never forget. Vega gave him his third kiss, perhaps there were several, and hugged him while he, still incredulous, looked again at the score over his shoulder to make sure that he was, indeed, world champion.. “The key was that I carried out an exercise of the highest difficulty that I could do, but that it was real,” he pointed out.

Díaz del Río obtained, so far, the fourth medal for the Spanish delegation in the World Cup in Fukuoka (Japan), the first gold. Previously, Emma García and Dennis González (silver in mixed technical duet), Iris Tió (bronze in solo technical routine) and Alisa Ozhogina and Iris Tió (bronze in technical duet) had climbed to the podium.. Only this last category is Olympic for the moment.

The swimmer from the Canary Islands surpassed the American Kenneth Gaudet, with 216.8, and the Kazakh Eduard Kim with 216 points. His great rival was missing, the Italian Giorgio Minisini, champion in the European past. “I am very happy and satisfied with how the competition has gone,” he valued.

Future

Then yes, after leaving the chair, Fernando's full smile while the Spanish public, excited, hugged and jumped at his success. The world champion, after listening to the Spanish anthem, already focused on “his next challenge, which is the European junior” and “with his sights set on [the World Cup] Doha.”

Unfortunately, his discipline is not yet included in the Olympic Games. In Paris 2024 they will allow boys in the team modality, but there will still be no mixed duo or only male. “I suppose that in Paris we will be able to see some boys in some team”, confided the canary.

However, Fernando only considers looking at things one year ahead: “I think the best thing is to enjoy each year and see how you feel physically and mentally each end of the season and leave the path open, so you don't put pressure on yourself”, ended the river.